Youth Summit - Ongoing Violence in Richmond

LAST SATURDAY TWO YOUNG KIDS WERE KILLED IN RICHMOND, a boy and a girl, two of five people shot that balmy summer night as I sat with friends a dozen blocks away, gathered to enjoy a barbeque and each others company while hearing a small army of sirens rush by.

Yesterday I attended the first annual Youth Summit at the East Bay Center for Performing Arts here in Richmond. It is a center that you can literally feel the energy coming out of the brickwork. A combination of panels, performances, and group discussions with subjects revolving around social justice and a commitment to excellence in the arts. There were invited guests including NY’s Global Action Project with a film on the prison industrial complex; Youth Speaks, a spoken word collaborative out of San Francisco, and a host of music, dance and art venues from the bay area. Kids with so much talent, optimism and hope about their futures – young stars in the making.

I left the youth summit at the end of the day and went to a park on the shoreline to watch a friend’s dogs get their daily run and to get some much needed air. At the park we heard gunshots and sirens and my friend, having lived so long in the city of Richmond, has this uncanny ability for figuring out exactly what neighborhood was involved and what kind of gun exchange had occurred. As we drove off and headed to avoid a train we ran into a helicopter landing area and witnessed the person who was shot being airlifted to the hospital. He was still alive after three gunshots to the neck. I had lost a very close friend in a drive-by last May in Boston and I melted down and cried for over an hour. Having co-directed an anti-violence program on the east coast for over 7 years now it all begins to add up, weighing you down and you have to struggle for those small reserves of strength that is all that keeps organizers going. I think the melt-down emanated from seeing all that “hope” at the summit that day and then witnessing the reality of where these kids live – what they are up against daily.

As I sit here Tuesday morning at 10:27AM the sirens are going off again.

By Shannon Flattery, Artistic Dir./Founder Touchable Stories
Photo Credit: Lolita Parker, Jr.

The following poem is by my husband Tim Mason.


Look into your own heart
Look deeper then into your soul
search the very bedrock of your being
ask yourself but one question.

Peer into your dark quarters
examine those things
about which you do not want to know
grapple with your demons and your doubts find that deep and holy place within from where all the warmth of your being emanates immerse yourself in the rhythms of breath allow them to inform your senses and know yes the question is answered know again that this profound knowing guides your step as you stand in the whirring, buzzing morass of contradiction and complexity that we all live each moment of our lives in.

Trust what you do not have words for
as you face your fears
one by one calling them into the light
meeting them, feet apart, arms by your sides, palms open.
Stand. As they glare at you and throw their punch.
Allow the blow to remind you that they too are real then not making a fist forgive your fear leave it free to find its own path on the planet wish it well in its journey

It is this way with Peace
both inner and outer
you retain your fragile control in a world out of your control you face your foe with open arms, when need be absorb the blow, and wish a place in heaven to wait patiently for your adversary as they enjoy a long and fruitful life.
Refuse to name an enemy.
Let your grudges walk away with your fears.
It is this way with Peace.

It can only be done completely.

more planning and questions

The second workshop was presented in a similar way but the audience and general vibe was different. This was either due to having heard it all before or because Shannon Flattery was there and she makes me laugh...or both.

Right of the bat I was bothered by some introductory statements. "Planning provides rules for development." The word development has come to have a negative connotation for me probably given my liberal education but I don't think its far from what the norm is: big developers exploiting disenfranchised communities. The second thing is the constant invocation of the phrase "blank slate." This really got to me because as far as I'm aware this proverbial "blank slate" is actually a city with long time residents and a history and significance that has to be taken into consideration. We are not starting from scratch and that is VERY important.

I feel like everyone who works, lives in, or drives through Richmond asks why? How can a city with so much potential end up this way? The answer is not one anyone can readily give. I keep looking at a map of Richmond's boundaries and it is so bizarre. (I've been trying without success to find a map of the boundaries to illustrate how silly they are but for some reason -note sarcasm- its hard to find). Point being...I think this holds a clue.

General Plan

Monday was the first of several "workshops" to get public input on Richmond's new general plan. After extensive outreach, the turnout was fairly disappointing. Daniel Iacofano of MIG, the developer that is charged with building or rebuilding Richmond, led the discussion.

The idea is that we are starting with a blank canvas. MIG has no plan and these workshops along with the "plan van" will capture the residents and business owners' vision of what Richmond should be. The plan van goes to neighborhoods where people do not or cannot leave to attend the workshops to gather as many opinions and ideas as possible.

From plan van responses, MIG put together a preliminary list of assets and issues for the workshop attendees to address.

The assets listed:

• strong diverse social fabric
• shoreline (32 miles - the most shoreline of any city in the Bay Area)
• growing economic base (places like campus bay and berlex, new Target location on MacDonald)
• large sites, enormous potential

The issues listed:

• safe & liveable neighborhoods
• stronger schools & libraries (community centers)
• expanding job opportunites (training programs to not only raise quantity but quality of jobs)
• improving environment (clean up industrial waste)
• housing (affordability)
• urban places (looking at other bay area cities for examples i.e emeryville)
• new energy on major coridors (big streets like Cutting, MacDonald, etc)
• MacDonald revitilization plan (retail needs)
• capitalizing on transit
• connecting people to parks

Public Comments

• sidewalks are bad, no connectivity (especially problematic for wheelchair bound citizens)
• places for kids (reconstruct libraries, afterschool programs, parks)
• homeless shelters
• support for seniors
• affordable housing for reunited families
• identify target population (provide numerical targets)
• don't just gentrify the area, provide the services to go along with the housing developments
• redevelopment displaces the city
• develop network of bike paths and community gardens
• land should be set aside for food, green industry (used to be bread basket for this city)
• 24th st is an eye sore: noisey and dangerous. industry is encroaching on residents
  
• Richmond needs to be rebuilt for current residents instead of looking to bring in outsiders
• MacDonald should be redeveloped for foot traffic instead of auto- natural hazards and airflow should be considered
• the usability of city services and transportation needs to be reworked
• Shorelines, parks (i.e Pt. Pinole, Pt. Richmond, Wildcat) not accessible for residents of downtown Richmond.
• The freeways divide the communities. (580 and 80)
• Lack of infrastructure (many parts of the city are out of immediate medical response time, sewers in bad shape)
• Environmental protection: There needs to be impact mitigation on shorelines, wetlands
• Real estate has skyrocketed and seniors have to move because social security does not pay for rising rent. Also, there is no foot access to basic need

A Richmond city planner defended the 580 and further suggested water transit links through major shoreline areas (some stupid comment about a hovercraft to costco). He also insisted on the importance of partnering with private developers to make the city viable. I didn't like the tone this took. While the workshops and the plan van are exactly how this process should be done, I am under the impression that the folks at MIG, at least the ones I've come in contact with, are not terribly responsive to new ideas. They say they want creative alternatives but they don't believe in them. Their "inside-the-box" thinking is not going to transform Richmond or implement these public comments.

The next workshop is tomorrow. For full schedule and other ways to get involved, go here.

Mapping Lucy - Richmond Tour

Lucy Begg is a UCB architecture student off on travel/research this year thanks to the Branner Travelling Fellowship at UC Berkeley. This entry is from her April blog after a tour of Richmond by Touchable Stories director Shannon Flattery.

Mapping Lucy--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
The last vehicle in the world....
.....that I imagined Shannon Flattery might be driving was a gold Mercedes. But the fact that she was made her all the more interesting, I like it when people don’t fit patterns of expectation. And besides it was a kind of retro 1970s model. So we drove around Richmond, homicide capital of the Bay Area, and she gave me a short history of her work and the project that she has been developing in the last couple of months.

I had contacted Shannon after receiving an email via a Berkeley list about her project in Boston, Touchable Stories, which engages neighbourhoods which suffer from high crime rates, poor employment prospects, gentrification pressure or all three. Similar to the premise of the Neighbourhood Story Project in New Orleans the idea is to empower residents to tell their own stories about where they live and in the process to challenge negative stereotypes. I wanted to meet Shannon because I am increasingly interested in what architects can learn from the qualitative methods used by artists working in the field of urban revitalisation. As a professional, your analytical tools inevitably condition how you come to understand a place and in turn how you choose to intervene. Architects tend towards information that can be represented in a diagram - physical attributes, quantifiable data, classifiable typologies (residential, commercial, open space, infrastructure etc). What can we learn from anthropological methods that seek to understand and define a place and its needs through narratives and stories?

The final outcomes of Shannon’s projects are interactive installations in a local ‘non-art’ space (a church hall, a disused municipal office….), a series of rooms by different artists, each exploring a particular theme which in some way defines the neighbourhood (for example languages, industries, landmarks, dreams, housing, spirituality, violence). The exhibit is open to the public for a year and often becomes a temporary social hub in the neighbourhood. During this time the organisers (a collaborative of artists and local residents) arrange special tours for ‘targeted’ groups. These are the people they believe need to hear the stories in particular - city officials, police, local businessmen, future investors, school teachers and so on.

The installation only begins to materialise after eighteen months of intense local interactions. This process takes a number of different forms, from interviews with up to a hundred individuals from a range of backgrounds, to community dinners (“to get people at the table whose voices should have been heard long ago”) and weekly volunteering for local organisations (“making ourselves useful too”). My favourite anecdote was about the tours of the city which Shannon has been given by cops of four different ethnic origins, African American, White, Hispanic and Asian, and the different perspectives they each have on the city. It was one of those who had introduced her to the best view of Richmond, which turns out to be from the parking lot of the golf course on the hill and which is also where we sat in the gold Mercedes while she explained how Richmond developed.

Since the realisation of each project depends on the participation of a network of local artists Shannon organised a dinner to which she invited a hundred artists who live in the area. She described how pleasantly surprised she was when sixty came and each one expressed a desire to help in any way they could. It was an interesting reminder that an ‘outsider’ can be a positive catalyst for local action.

I was also fascinated by how she had interpreted the relationship between Berkeley and Richmond, “two totally different worlds”. A wealth of research has been produced about Richmond in the past, “though you wouldn’t know it to look at the city”. Since much of it is stored at Berkeley, one of her goals is to provoke a discussion about how all that intellectual and financial energy can be channelled towards the city in more productive ways. So another of her dinners involved getting together as many academics as she could in Berkeley who had studied various aspects of Richmond in recent decades.

As we drove through the Iron Triangle, the ‘no-go’ area in the centre of the city so-called because it is framed by three railway tracks, Shannon was emphatic about the one thing she has continually learnt from her experiences - “that no-one has ever really taken the time to listen to the people who live here”. She is certainly honest about her bias against well-paid officials, consultants and….architects! Interestingly, her past installations have often been a catalyst for an influx of neighbourhood investment though this is not an explicit or even implicit goal. In this sense it will be interesting to follow her progress in Richmond which has suffered from disinvestment ever since the shipyards which effectively brought it into being closed after the Second World War (though a planning and design group in Berkeley has just been paid $1.5 million to draw up a new masterplan for the city…..) She drove us (Jay and me) out to an old Model T Ford Factory, the first on the West Coast (?), a giant edifice of a warehouse, which sits empty on the edge of the bay, beautiful and bleak, right next to the displaced city hall which apparently moved out into an isolated strip development while refurbishments were taking place and seems not to have raised the money to move back into town.

I had only a snapshot glimpse into Shannon’s project but her mode of working corresponds with what has caught my imagination about the people that I’m going to work with in Europe (more about that in another post), some of the speakers at Structures for Inclusion and the Rural Studio – the notion of the on-site presence, where interaction through everyday activities in everyday spaces dissolves the formal boundaries and professional divides of official ‘meetings’ allowing more subtle, complex understandings of a place to emerge. This unfortunately is the ‘time’ which is not easily categorised in the balance sheet of budget-tight consultation processes. I’ll look forward to seeing her developments when I return to Berkeley next Spring!

Chevron

I really enjoy running around Richmond all day and seeing the wide spectrum of "good and bad." This makes me feel like I'm getting a holistic experience. The one thing that tied it all together for me though: Chevron.

I spent the earlier part of my day with a friend of mine who was raised in Richmond. We went to Wildcat Canyon (from the Richmond entrance), and the EcoVillage where we met Shyaam.


To contrast these positive experiences we went to the Hilltop Mall. Hilltop opened in 1976 and sucked business away from downtown Richmond. Stores either had to move in to the Hilltop complex or shut down entirely. This of course really impacted the local economy. The mall was not as crowded as one would expect for a summer day. Where I grew up, teenagers took shelter at the mall during school's off-season. There were the usual big names like Macy's and McDonald's but the smaller spaces were occupied by names I had never heard of. My friend and tour guide informed me that most of these businesses change every 5 months or so. This didn't surprise me. The big guys can afford to stay there without making profit because they can support themselves with revenue from other locations but the little guy does not have much chance here.

We concluded our brief tour with a walk around the neighborhood my friend grew up in. He showed me Richmond High School, the newly rebuilt Boys and Girls Club, and of course the Chevron refinery looming ominously in the background. I asked my friend about what his childhood was like here, where the kids played, all the seemingly mundane details that make for a great piece of the puzzle when you look at the grand scheme of things. As one would expect, he told me about the noises he heard at night - the sirens, the occasional gun shots. He spent his free time at friends' houses. This also doesn't surprise me given the lack of public space. The most interesting or perhaps most pertinent comment my friend made was about what he realized when he "went away" to college - to UC Berkeley. Everything about life in Richmond seemed normal to him until he got to Berkeley and realized that his city was "different" and, furthermore, that it was of interest to the professors and researchers.

On my way home I decided to swing by the greenhouses that have become a hot topic among the folks at touchable stories. Being there always makes me utter obsenities under my breath. The potential for these buildings is so great.

Touchable Stories "WISH LIST"

This post will be used as Touchable Stories ongoing "WISH LIST" for various supplies and services needed on our journey in creating community based art & dialog in Richmond. As a non-profit 510(c )3 organization, all donations are tax deductable as well.

Thank you in advance for jumping on into the fray!
- Shannon Flattery, Artistic Dir./Founder

WISH LIST:

- Projectors - any type: old, new,data, 3 lens, etc.

- VCR's & Monitors

- Miniature monitors - cell phone size up to 8 inch screens

- x4 Folding Leg Tables : 6-8ft long (for community dinners)

- Folding Chairs

- x2 Round Outdoor Tables w/chairs

- Black-Out material (for camera obscura)

- Batteries: AA, D cell, & C

- Glass Jars w/Lids (any size but can't have any embossed writing /designs on them - clear no colors)

- Paired Speakers - house to computer size

- Empty Wooden Picture Frames /Mirror Frames (no metal or very narrow frames)

- Picture frames with glass and backing (multiples: 8 1/2 x11, 11X14 or 16x20)

Photographs

Dashal, a Berkeley student doing research in Richmond and a great ally to the touchable stories project has started a really great blog site for her photography. I added a link to the links section on the right. Check it out!